Google faces a $660,000 fine after a French court ruling that the company is abusing its dominant position in mapping by making Google Maps free.

According to The Economic Times, the French commercial court “upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google France and its parent company Google Inc. for providing free web mapping services to some businesses.”

Bottin Cartographes provides mapping services for a cost, and its website boasts several business clients such as Louis Vuitton, Airbus and several automobile manufacturers.
The French court ruling requires Google to pay $660,000 (500,000 Euros) in damages and interest to Bottin Cartographes, along with a 15,000 Euro fine. That means Google’s total cost from the ruling is about $680,000.

A Google France spokesperson says the company is still studying the court’s decision and reviewing its options, adding that Google is “convinced that a free high-quality mapping tool is beneficial for both Internet users and websites.”

Google has come under attack for violating users' privacy and ignoring their wishes after admitting that it intentionally circumvented security settings in Apple's Safari browser to track users on both desktop computers and iPhones.

A number of other advertisers exploited the loophole it had created to track those users too.

"Our data suggests that millions of users may have been affected," Jonathan Mayer, the independent researcher at Stanford University who discovered the workaround by the search giant, told the Guardian.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a pressure group for users' rights online, said that then admission was bad news for the company, coming so soon after the news that it is aiming to unite the data it keeps about people using different parts of its services such as YouTube and its main search engine.

"It's time for Google to acknowledge that it can do a better job of respecting the privacy of web users," the EFF said in a statement, in which it warned: "Google, the time has finally come. You need to make a pro-privacy offering to restore your user's trust … it's time for a new chapter in Google's policy regarding privacy. It's time to commit to giving users a voice about tracking and then respecting those wishes."

The company may also be tracking people without their knowledge on other browsers, including those on its own Android phones, because those do not implement the same security restrictions as Apple does.

The admission will put extra pressure on the company in the US where it has already fallen foul of the US Federal Trade Commission over privacy practices, and in Europe where it could still be subject to an antitrust investigation by the European Commission.

The circumvention, carried out by a small piece of code, meant that people could see messages indicating whether their associates in Google "Circles" on its Google+ social network had clicked on ads – but it also let Google and other advertisers see which websites people landed on.

Mayer told the Guardian that his team had been looking into what was being done for two months, and was sure it had been used by Google certainly since December – though it could have been running since July 2011.

Google declined to answer a Guardian request to say when it had begun the tracking.

The search giant insisted that a report in the Wall Street Journal, which first revealed the tracking, mischaracterised its actions, and that the users' identities had remained anonymous throughout – although they were signed in to Google's systems.

At least three other advertising companies – Vibrant Media, WPP Plc's Media Innovation Group and Gannett's PointRoll – also exploited the Google code to track users.

Google's search engine is the default on all Apple's mobile devices and in its Safari browser, of which there are more than 100m in use.

By default, Apple's Safari browser only accepts cookies – small chunks of text with unique information such as the time of a user's visit to a site – which come directly from by the sites that users are browsing.

But Google wanted to use its DoubleClick and other ad systems to track where people go online, so that it can serve "relevant" ads. It also wanted to be able to integrate its Google+ data into that information.

To get around Safari's blocking, the Wall Street Journal explains, Google put code onto some of its ads served by DoubleClick's servers at doubleclick.net to fool the Safari browser into thinking the user was interacting with DoubleClick.

But, the EFF notes: "That had the side effect of completely undoing all of Safari's protections against doubleclick.net."

That meant that other DoubleClick cookies, including the principal tracking one which Safari would normally block, were allowed.

"Like a balloon popped with a pinprick, all of Safari's protections against DoubleClick were gone," the EFF said.

In a statement, Google said: "We used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled. It's important to stress that these advertising cookies do not collect personal information.

"Unlike other major browsers, Apple's Safari browser blocks third-party cookies by default. However, Safari enables many web features for its users that rely on third parties and third-party cookies, such as [Facebook's] 'Like' buttons.

"Last year, we began using this functionality to enable features for signed-in Google users on Safari who had opted to see personalised ads and other content – such as the ability to '+1' [the equivalent of Facebook's 'Like' for Google's new Google+ social network] things that interest them.

"To enable these features, we created a temporary communication link between Safari browsers and Google's servers, so that we could ascertain whether Safari users were also signed into Google, and had opted for this type of personalisation.

"But we designed this so that the information passing between the user's Safari browser and Google's servers was anonymous – effectively creating a barrier between their personal information and the web content they browse.

"However, the Safari browser contained functionality that then enabled other Google advertising cookies to be set on the browser [by other advertising companies using the DoubleClick network]. We didn't anticipate that this would happen, and we have now started removing these advertising cookies from Safari browsers. It's important to stress that, just as on other browsers, these advertising cookies do not collect personal information."

While the data collected by the cookies would not contain the user's name or personal details, privacy campaigners have long pointed out that the pattern of a user's web browsing allows a picture of them to be built up which can led to direct identification or profiling so precise that it leave little doubt about their identity.

Google's use of such systems in defiance of the settings of the user's browser is the first time the company has been found doing so.

Google said: "Users of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome were not affected. Nor were users of any browser (including Safari) who have opted out of our interest-based advertising program using Google's Ads Preferences Manager.

"We didn't anticipate that this would happen, and we have now started removing these advertising cookies from Safari browsers."

Cory Doctorow, a novelist and columnist for the Guardian, commented at the Boing Boing blog that he believed the tactic by Google indicated that the internal pressure put on staff by chief executive Larry Page to integrated "social" elements into all its work – which has included the announcement that all staff bonuses are now tied to Google's success in social software – "is leading the company to take steps to integrate G+ at the expense of the quality of its other services.

He pointed out that his own Google Mail account, whose address he has never made public, "has somehow become visible to G+ users, so that I get many, many G+ updates and invites to this theoretically private address, every day, despite never having opted into a directory and never having joined G+".

Quote:20 February 2012 Last updated at 00:16 GMT Are search engine result figures accurate?
By Ruth AlexanderBBC News

Can you measure your popularity - or that of anyone or anything - by the number of results that an internet search generates?

Enter the name Tim Harford into Google and you get 835,000 results.

Or 325,000, or 285,000… I got these widely differing results on computers within metres of each other in the same office at the same time.

For a few heart-stopping moments, we thought we had broken Google - with the name of the presenter of BBC radio's More or Less programme.

But no. The first lesson of search engine accuracy is that the number of results you'll get depends on the computer you're using and which copy of Google you're using. There are several copies of Google in the world, and your search query will be dispatched to whichever version is the least busy.

The results will also be personalised, according to what you've searched for previously and where you're based.

It's also worth mentioning that I searched for myself and got 68 million web page results.

I've written no books, starred in no films, and you've probably never heard of me. And yet I'm massive on the web.

Or, more likely, my secret to search engine success is to have a name made up of two popular first names.

So, search results can be misleading and the number of results won't mean much if you fail to use inverted commas around a name or a phrase, or if you use ambiguous terms. Ask a silly question, get a silly answer.

But even when you've got your enquiry honed to a fine degree, and consider yourself a champion in google-fu, don't believe the numbers.

You might think that if a search engine tells you it's returned, say, 68 million results, there are 68 million pages you could, in principle, view.

Not necessarily so.

A study comparing results from three search engines for queries that generated fewer than 1,000 results, found that even the best-performing search engine was pretty rough and ready in its calculations.

None of the search engines was providing exact document counting, only estimates.

The researchers found that the figures were pretty accurate when they searched for one word. But each time they added a word to the search, the numbers got less and less accurate.

"Eighty per cent of the time, the estimates were reliable - they had only 10% errors in their estimation," says Ahmet Uyar, the head of the computer engineering department at Mersin University, in Turkey.

"But when we tried two-word queries, then the accuracy was reduced almost by half."

And when the researchers submitted five-word queries, the percentage of accurate result estimates halved again - the best-performing search engine estimated the correct number of matching documents to within 10% of the actual number less than 20% of the time.

I tried it myself, searching for the first part of a limerick: "There was a young man from Darjeeling who got on a bus."

First of all, the search engine showed 15 results. It invited me to click to see "omitted results". I did, and it said it had found 29 pages in total but, in actual fact, it could only show 21.

Experts say this lack of precision is tolerated in the name of speed. The super computers behind the scenes have to work very quickly, mixing and matching lots of documents, throwing out spam and pages where the words surrounding your search term are the same - all this in less than a second or two.

And think how much worldwide web there is to search. Search engines probably cover only a fraction of it.

In 1999, researchers tried to assess exactly how much of the web was to be found in the indexes of major search engines - about 16%, they concluded, in a paper published in Nature.

And although search engines have developed a great deal since then, the internet has also been growing very rapidly, and it's likely that search engines still only cover a relatively small section of the information that is out there. And only ever will.

Search engines could crawl the internet forever and still not find all the web pages that exist, according to Professor Mike Thelwall, a cybermetrics researcher at Wolverhampton University in the UK.

"The reason is there's no one big list of web pages in the world, or even a single list of all the websites in the world," he says.

"Essentially all search engines start with a few big websites and then they try to find new websites, mainly by following the links on existing websites. So if you've got a fairly new website that no-one links to yet, the chances are Google won't know about you."

And many web pages don't exist until you request them, he adds.

"Google search results pages are an example, since the number of different queries that could be submitted to Google to create a results page is practically infinite.

"Also, many websites are created by content management systems now, with different variants for different users created when the user visits.

"These 'dynamically-created pages' also include many web 2.0 pages that are editable by users, such as social networking sites."